I have a substantial amount of savings in EmigrantDirect.com. So imagine my dismay when I discovered EmigrantDirect is a major sponsor of Bill O’Reilly’s radio program.

I found out in the wake of O’Reilly’s endorsement of a terrorist attack on San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. His statements spawned a DailyKos boycott. I don’t normally take part in these things, but the thought of my money helping to sponsor O’Reilly really bothered me.

I sent this letter to EmigrantDirect, which I thought was actually pretty calm and reasonable:

Dear Emigrant,

I am an EmigrantDirect.com customer with over $xx,xxx in one of your “American Dream” Savings Accounts. I was also appalled to discover that you sponsor Bill O’Reilly’s radio program. Normally, this would bother me, but not enough to write this email. However, recently O’Reilly called for the destruction of San Francisco by terrorists, in response to their ban of military recruiting in schools:

O’REILLY: “Hey, you know, if you want to ban military recruiting, fine, but I’m not going to give you another nickel of federal money. You know, if I’m the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium, and I say, ‘Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you’re not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead.’

“And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.”

He later confirmed his position that, yes, he does believe an American city deserves to be destroyed by Al Qaeda. MediaMatters.org reported the story, and members of Daily Kos began a letter-writing campaign.

If you do not pull your sponsorship of O’Reilly’s radio program, I will be forced to close my account with you and take my money to another bank. It would pain me to do so — your 4% interest rate is the best anywhere — but I’d rather sacrifice a fraction of a point of interest than support a business that sponsors this program.

Thanks,

Michael R. Barklage

EmigrantDirect never responded to me and (unlike another sponsor, Equifax) did not pull its ads from O’Reilly’s show. So it’s time to put my money where my politics are and close my account with them.

James had even more money in EmigrantDirect than I did, and he’s doing the same. After I sent the letter, he found another online bank that offers a 4% savings rate: HSBC Direct.

Better still, unlike Emigrant, HSBC provides its customers with an ACTUAL USER INTERFACE that human beings would conceivably want to use. So, until I find out that HSBC sponsors the 700 Club or Prussian Blue or something, I’ll stick with them.

…I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of my Sunday going through the archives of The Order of the Stick, yet another poorly-drawn but hilarious online comic. You need a little bit of D&D experience to get the humor, but not much. Trust me. And it’s surprisingly well-written, with at least one great gag in almost every strip.

Meet the cast of characters, then start at the beginning.

Star Trek vs. Babylon 5. The debate has raged among the nerdiest of nerds for years, and now the issue has been resolved the only way it could’ve been: in Finnish with English subtitles.

According to Reuters, Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning has been downloaded three million times in the last two months, making it the most popular Finnish-language film OF ALL TIME. Not that the competition was stiff, exactly.

Believe it or not… it’s not a bad flick.

The plot makes no sense, but it doesn’t have to. It’s a genuinely funny spoof in the tradition of the Zucker/Abrahams parodies I loved as a kid, and the special effects are frankly astounding for a zero-budget fan production.

You’ll need a fast connection and the latest XVid codecs, but it’s worth a download. It’s the most elaborate crossover fanfic in history! What more could you want?

Yaaay!

Kolbe Confirms He Won’t Run Again

Rep. Jim Kolbe, a leading proponent of free trade and the only openly gay Republican in Congress, announced Wednesday that he will not seek a 12th term next year.

Kolbe, 63, said in a statement that he wants to find “new avenues of service” and spend more time in Arizona.

For those of you who don’t know Tucson politics — and that would be almost all of you — Kolbe represents Arizona’s 8th District, where I lived for five years.

Kolbe was never exactly “out and proud.” He came out rather than be outed by gay activists for his vote in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act in the 90s. Most of Tucson’s Republicans who voted for him over the last decade probably didn’t even know he was gay. (That’s the case for at least one homophobic Christian I know.)

I’m glad to see him go. Yeah, I know Kolbe’s a “moderate” on social issues, and his replacement could be much worse. And I know the Democrats are too terrified of voter backlash to take a strong stand in favor of equal rights for gays. The main difference between the parties is a lack of malice on the part of Democrats.

That’s why I have so little respect for Jim Kolbe, Andrew Sullivan, and the Log Cabin Republicans. Preserving your rights should trump ideology. “I like lower taxes” doesn’t count for much when it means supporting those who would intern you in re-education camps, if they thought they could get away with it.

At the Republican National Convention last year, Kolbe spoke about tax reform. Delegates responded by praying at him in protest. I like to think that’s partly why Kolbe is retiring, but who knows.

Anyway, this makes Kolbe’s seat a possible Dem pickup next year. AZ-8 only went 49% and 53% for Bush in his two elections, so it’s not exactly GOP-dominated. I personally hope Dean’s DNC gets behind Jeff Latas, a former jet pilot with a Pentagon background that might appeal to Tucson’s large number of missile-building Raytheon employees.

I like Latas’s stances on the issues, but the DNC may choose to go with a state rep with some political experience instead.

On the GOP side, unless they recruit someone relatively sane, the candidate will probably be Randy “Guns in Bars” Graf, golf pro turned lunatic state rep. Unfortunately, if he gets the nomination, I don’t expect him to be a pushover. AZ-8 extends down to Arizona’s southern and eastern borders, so don’t underestimate the “gun-toting racist homophobic redneck” vote.

I’ve been a regular member of the Delphi Forums for over five years, since I discovered the Warren Ellis Forum (now closed). In the intervening time, I’ve gotten to know some of my fellow forumites, spending time with them at comic book conventions once or twice a year. I even had a forum of my own for a while, before I shut it down and created this blog.

But no matter how much I enjoy the forums, it’s always been difficult to recommend them to friends — unless you pay four bucks a month to become a member, Delphi bombards you with ads, an aggravating interface, and a host of other annoyances.

Until now.

This week, Delphi’s poor customer service finally drove everyone to a new, custom-created home: the V-Hive. It’s free, devoid of ads, and full-featured.

I frequently visit the following forums. Click the links and register, if you like (one registration lets you post on all of them):

A-Button – Bryan Lambert’s gaming forum “for smart gamers.” Also the home of my Urban Dead human and zombie groups.

TV… and Not Much Else – Most of the shows I currently watch came recommended by these guys, including lesser-known gems like Wonderfalls.

Sk8 Jesus – Dan Evans and his nerd pals.

New Medievalism – A useful distillation of news stories from around the Net, mostly about politics but also animal attacks, amusingly horrific deaths, etc. Leans left, but isn’t activist about it. (It hasn’t officially re-opened yet, as of this writing.)

Several other forums are available on the “My Forums” link under the banner area, but I generally stick to the ones above. There are only so many hours in the day…

The Couch Potato 3000!

After the TiVo fiasco, I decided to build my own digital video recorder — but better. Some of the features of the CP3K:

- records and pauses live TV, just like a TiVo
- dual tuner, so I can record two shows at once, or watch one show and record another
- has IE and BitTorrent; Doctor Who‘s second season starts soon, after all
- plays DVDs
- burns dual-layer DVDs
- plays CDs and MP3s
- outputs audio to my surround-sound system
- remote control for all of it

The components, for any nerds who might care:

Antec Overture II case
Asus K8V-MX motherboard
AMD Sempron 2500+ CPU
512MB RAM
Western Digital 120GB hard drive (good for 40 hours of recorded TV)
D-Link wireless internet card
Hauppage WinTV PVR-500 dual tuner video card (for TV-in)
nVidia GeForce FX5200 video card (for composite TV-out)
Sound Blaster Live! card (swiped from my desktop)
Sony dual-layer DVD-RW drive
MS WinXP Media Center Edition
MS Remote Control for MCE

All of this ran me about $750, including the cable I needed to connect the sound card to my surround sound receiver. Considering it’s a TiVo on steroids, DVD player, DVD recorder, and stereo system, that’s not a bad price.

There are some downsides I’ve noticed so far. The video quality seems downgraded, probably because the Hauppage card is splitting the cable signal. Likewise, I think the audio is a bit subpar when playing a DVD.

In a pleasant departure, hardware setup was a breeze, but there was one major problem with WinMCE — it doesn’t come with an MPEG-2 decoder. This means that you can’t watch TV or DVD until you download a decoder for $20. In other words, WinMCE DOESN’T WORK OUT OF THE BOX.

What possesses Microsoft to do this sort of thing? Honestly, it’s what drives people to buy Macs. I, ahem, got around paying for the decoder, though. And once I did, I found the WinMCE interface to be pretty simple and intuitive.

The Eastlake office building I work in is about to be demolished to make room for a shitload of condos, so we have to get out by the end of this month. Our new office space is in Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle.

I’ll have to start taking the bus every day — parking spots are $200 while bus passes are $50, and my work is only willing to pay for the latter — but I actually consider that a bonus. Half an hour to read or scribble in my notebook vs. an aggravating 15-20 minute commute? I’ll take it.

Pioneer Square is packed with places to eat and/or drink. Plus, we’ll be across the street from Elliott Bay Book Company, one of the two major bookstores in Seattle. (The other is the University Bookstore, which hosted the Pratchett and Gaiman signings.)

Speaking of which, I should get back to work on my next BaQuiFiWriMo story. This idea gets better the more I think about it, but it doesn’t quite have a shape yet…

Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys is both funny and well-written — the first half is well-written but not funny, and the second half is funny but not well-written.

Okay, maybe I’m being a little hard on it. It’s an enjoyable novel. I just expected… more somehow. It isn’t similar to Christopher Moore’s take on a similar subject after all, but it also doesn’t compare well.

The story’s conclusion relies on every major character separately and coincidentally travelling to the same small Caribbean island. It also contains the most laugh-out-loud moments, beginning with Fat Charlie’s day in prison. The rest of the book is only comedy in the Shakespearean sense — a lot of wacky things happening, but no actual jokes.

Anansi Boys could be adapted into a pretty good musical comedy, actually. The resolution partly involves the ability of songs to alter reality, which is the only way the audience will buy some of the plot twists.

Entry #1 for BaQuiFiWriMo.
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It’s not going well.

Here I am nine days into the month, and I have 750 words down. Of those, I only like about half of them.

I looked through my notes for four old, scribbled concepts and discovered that the reason they were old, scribbled concepts for such a long time is that they kind of suck.

I took my notebook to lunch today to work on some troublesome dialogue and instead went off on a tangent that might end up in a longer novella or novel, if I can work out a plotline. Which is nice, but no help to my current project.

I haven’t given up yet, though. We’ll see.